Sunday, January 18, 2009

SATA Hard Disk Drives

The ATA hard disk drives or the Advanced Technology Attachment hard disk drives usually come in Serial as well as the Parallel IDE formats. The Serial ATA is called as the SATA. The concept of the SATA was introduced in the year of 1986. A simple definition of the SATA can be that it can be called as the serial version of the ATA or the IDE interface. This concept of the SATA was ratified by the ANSI in year of 2002. it can be considered as the next generation technology.

The advantage of the SATA is that it has the capability to provide point to point channel communication between mother board or the main board and the drive. Where as in the Parallel ATA that can be termed as the PATA the architecture of the master slave combination is supported on a single cable for the two drives it supports.

The SATA is also used in the implementation of the RAID. The primary reason for the design of the SATA is for the transfer of the data from and to the hard disk drives. The SATA is actually a bus that gives a high performance of data transfer. The data transmission is achieved in the in the half duplex channel.

The speed of the data transmission is about 1.5 giga bits per second or 150 mega bytes per second. This is a unidirectional. Eventually the SATA II was introduced in the year of 2003 that has the speed of about 3 giga bits per second or 300 mega bytes per second. The Parallel ATA hard disk drive uses the flat cable that has the width of around 18’’. But in the case of the Serial ATA a four wire cable is used that has a length of one meter.

This is advantageous in comparison with the Parallel ATA since the cables and the connectors that are used take less space than their counterparts in the Parallel ATA. There are also the External SATA’s or the external hard disk drives that are available. They can be termed as the eSATA. The External SATA is also known as the External Direct Attached Storage for notebook computers or the laptops.

There application is also found in the desktop computer systems, consumer electronics and entry servers. The external hard disk drives whether it may be the External SATA or other drives; presently they use the USB or the IEEE 1394. The usage of these interfaces can compromise on the performance of the drive because they are not as faster as the actual SATA in terms of the peak values.

The important benefits of using the external SATA are explained below. It is very much faster than the other presently available storage devices like the USB 2 or the IEEE 1394 etc. In comparison it is about six times faster. The External SATA is quite robust and also has a connection that is considered as user friendly.

The External SATA also has a high performance. It is also considered as the cost effective expansion storage device. The real advantage is the portability and ease of handling that is provided with the two meter long connectors and the shielded cables that come along with it. The overall performance makes it a popular storage device.


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